A VOICE CARRIES

Leslie Moore is flashing his remaining teeth in a smile. It's really some kind of day, with him sitting here on a bench in city hall, wearing a sharp suit.

"We decided we was going to stand up," he says, talking about himself and the other older men in suits crowded onto the bench next to him. "We weren't going to take no more."

It was 40 years ago that they - the Memphis sanitation workers of 1968 - were all outside this same city hall, risking their safety, their livelihood and maybe their lives, making demands that had never been made before in Memphis, but standing up for nothing more than the right to be treated the same as their white counterparts. Their city fought them then. Now it was about to honor them.

They'll take it, this fresh honor. They'll smile and shake hands. But there's nothing anybody can give them these four decades later that will match what one man already did.

It was 40 years ago today that a rifle bullet sealed Martin Luther King Jr.'s message. He was here for the strike of the black sanitation workers. He was standing on the second-floor walkway outside his door at the Lorraine Motel. He was trying to do something for these ordinary men who were risking so much.

Since the moment the assassin's bullet silenced him, King's voice has carried longer than the 39-year-old man had lived and farther than he ever reached. As King's former colleague the Rev. Jesse Jackson put it at the Thursday ceremony for the sanitation workers: "What was a crucifixion in '68 is a resurrection in '08."

As the country looks at Memphis today and remembers, some of those whose lives have been tied to the American civil-rights movement wonder how his voice will carry through another 40 years, when the witnesses are gone.

Moore, 61, probably won't be around to tell young people what it was like in a Jim Crow city when he and his co-workers refused to take unfair treatment any more. He won't be able to tell them about the day King came to Memphis and things changed.

"When King came along, that made everything possible."

Moore spends some of his time as a pastor at an outreach ministry. He runs into plenty of people who weren't born in King's lifetime. When they're told of the ugly parts of history, "some of them might understand," he said. "Some of them don't. Some don't want to understand."

When nobody's left alive to tell it, he trusts the message will keep going. "God always got somebody to carry it on. That's what makes it so beautiful," he says. Anyway, "the history speaks for itself. All they gotta do is push it and keep telling it.

"They need to know their history. They need to know all of it."

To think that the story of the sanitation workers' strike is told in schools makes Moore feel good, like he's helped provide a "road map."

People have changed, though. They're more scattered, he thinks, doing their own things. William Lucy, who was a young union organizer then and who is an international union leader now, sees that, too. "This kind of struggle does not occur any more," Lucy says. That's good, in a way, because maybe it's not as necessary now. But these milestones, these moments when everything changed, need to be preserved, he thinks.

"Each generation, you lose something," he says. The intensity of feeling wanes. He thinks the facts of the 1968 strike and the work of King will live forever, but he's not sure that people will feel the weight of their accomplishments as any more than these basic facts: the sanitation workers got their union, and a famous reverend was murdered while trying to help them.

Moore's hope for "somebody to carry it on" might not be that hard to find in Memphis. The Lorraine Motel is a shrine, connected to a National Civil Rights Museum. There are people who work there who weren't yet born in 1968, but their job is to keep the memory alive.

Allison Fouche, museum spokeswoman, is 33, raised by parents who kept civil rights a regular topic in their home. "It only motivates me to make sure the story is told, and told correctly."

Sherry Holliman, who does museum accounting, is 36. "I don't believe that our generation takes Dr. King's movement as seriously as it should."

Ashley McGhee, in outside sales, is 30. "The danger of forgetting is it puts you on that path to reverting back."

Their parents and older colleagues can still tell of King's song of equality from the podiums and the pulpits, and how very human he was. But these three - and a lot of others - have committed to explaining it all to theirs and the next generations, to those who grow up with Martin Luther King Jr. boulevards in their cities and could never know the history-book symbol.

As a salesperson, McGhee says, "what I'm selling is this historical experience. There is a need to come here. You gain exposure to a thread that weaves us together." But she cautions that the museum "can only prick the social conscience."

She thinks the previous generation, the first to grow up with some of the benefits that King and others struggled for, was eager to forget how bad the other times were.

"Our parents had a false sense of security," McGhee says, and their children often weren't taught their full history. The result: "We're suffering from the disease of apathy."

Judging from the satellite trucks that pulled into Memphis this week, much of the country does still recognize something important in King.

Today, as celebrities and leaders pour into town, King's oldest colleagues dig into their memories. And people who never knew him come and look at where he died.

As people tap old grief and grasp for meaning, Moore will take his new plaque home, get out of his suit and head back to work. He's still, 40 years later, a sanitation worker, still driving a truck for the city. This day, he's called a national hero. Tomorrow, he'll collect Memphis' trash again.

But when he's on the job, he'll count on being treated just like anybody else.